My colleague Brian Rosenthal has uncovered the culprit: state officials looking to save a buck on the backs of special needs children.

Their scheme - not seen in any other state – was quietly implemented by former Gov. Rick Perry's administration and has been in effect for more than a decade. It may violate federal law. It has definitely caused irreversible harm to tens of thousands of children.

But don't take the Chronicle's word for it. Just Google the words "Texas special education." One of the first sites to come up belongs to the Texas Education Agency. Click on the link, and here's the very first sentence:

"About one of every eight Texas public school students need special education services."

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That's a rate of 12.5 percent, already relatively low for our high-poverty population. Yet, where did TEA set the target on the percentage of kids who should get services? At 8.5 percent.

The number was arbitrary. It wasn't based on research. Former TEA Commissioner Shirley Neeley Richardson, who developed it, told Rosenthal that it was a "first stab" at addressing the problem of over-identification.

Over-identification? At the time it was implemented, Texas was at 12 percent, already the ninth-lowest rate of special education students in the country.

No, TEA officials sloughed off all those vulnerable kids with their eyes open. The decision was callous and calculated. It should make every proud Texan ashamed and angry.

To me, one of the most infuriating areas of discrepancy is over learning disabilities, where the rate of services has dropped nearly 46 percent since the new system was put in place.

Take dyslexia alone. The Chronicle's Jennifer Radcliffe has reported on the state under-serving this population for years. In 2015, she found that Texas public schools were identifying just 2.5 percent of students with the common reading disability. The actual percentage of dyslexic students is conservatively estimated at 10 percent. It could be as high as 20 percent.

It's maddening not to help these kids because dyslexia can be overcome. Dyslexic students, who use a less-efficient part of their brains to read, can and do catch up with an intense, phonics-based instruction that can help rewire the brain.

"The student, regardless of ZIP code, who gets that help, it literally changes their family tree," Tracy Weeden, president and CEO of Neuhaus Education Center, a nonprofit that specializes in reading instruction, told me Tuesday. "It actually impacts them for the rest of their life."

But kids can't get that instruction if they're not identified. And if their parents don't have the resources to get help elsewhere, they're relegated to a school career of frustration and a potential lifetime of illiteracy.

All the billions we've spent on testing and test prep in this state. If we'd just identify the dyslexic kids early, and get them the help they need, we could see a huge boost in student performance.

But Rosenthal's reporting shows that Texas has denied vital support to children with a wide variety of learning challenges, including autism, speech impediments, even blindness and deafness.

Students from non-English-speaking homes and large urban districts were hardest hit.

TEA has claimed that the 8.5 percent benchmark was never a cap on special education enrollment.

No, not at all. The state agency just created a scorecard in which districts lost points for exceeding that threshold. Low scores could result in fines, visits from Austin regulators, "corrective action plans," or even a state takeover of the district.

Think about that.

Districts could be punished for providing services to every student who needed them.

In Texas, we're used to "caring" for our children on the cheap. Just look at the high rate of uninsured. Look at the sorry state of the foster care system.

But we can't accept systemic child abuse as some kind of normal.

And child abuse is what we're talking about. Consider the case Rosenthal unearthed of 11-year-old Lilly Barrera, from a rural Central Texas district.

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Lilly went through four years of superficial accommodations - including preferential seating and "verbal praise for accomplishments" - to supposedly address her learning disability in reading.

She entered sixth grade this fall with a third-grade reading ability, Rosenthal reported, and a medical diagnosis of full-scale depression, caused by years of failing. If you're not the sort of person who gets emotional about harming children - setting them up to fail, depriving them of rights, and such - consider the economic impact on Texas of limiting the potential of 250,000 children denied critical services such as therapy, counseling and tutoring.

That's a quarter of a million children who may never love school, who may actually grow to hate it. That's children who may never achieve their highest earning potential or fully contribute to society.

That's thousands of kids you and I are paying to educate, in an ineffective, counterproductive way.

In an update Tuesday, Rosenthal reported that several officials vowed to eliminate the target. But the folks with the power to change it - TEA, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus - declined comment.

And really, what does one say about the state's decision to create an underclass of children in the name of fiscal conservatism?

This is what you say: it's immoral and probably illegal. And we're going to put an end to it. Texas is better than this.